Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The Other Saatchi Showdown

According to Alexa.com, the web traffic measuring site, Saatchi Online has overtaken art.com as the webs most visited art site. Over the past week Saatchi’s ranking was 1989 compared to art.com’s 2366.
Art.com did manage to annoy a lot of its artists, if the negative chatter on art forums is any indication, with their re-structure a few months ago. Saatchi, on the other side of the pond, quietly went about building an impressive traffic base with its Showdown competition and its recently opened Saleroom. And according to www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk front page they had 56,483,120 hits in the 24 hours preceding the writing of this post.
The Showdown competition is in its second incarnation and attracting healthy interest from the 70 thousand artists registered at the site. The Saleroom Online has been open just over a week and has over 16,000 works of art available for sale commission free for both buyers and sellers. According to London’s Financial Times, annualized art sales of $130m have been estimated.
Also according to the FT, Charles Saatchi has no interest in any kind of commercial participation in artists’ sales. Has the man with the reputation of re-invigorating the British art scene now set his sights on the internet art scene?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

According to Alexa Saatchi Online also has HUGE traffic from India. India happens to have a lot of pay-per-click companies as in a website will pay those companies to visit their site in order to manipulate traffic rank. Saatchi really needs to be exposed for this unethical practice.